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8.12.2004
More on the Virtues of Enlightened Self-Interest (a.k.a. Greed)
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A contention of the Copyleft, made during the Eldred litigation, for example, is that the long duration of copyright blocks access to creative products. The image conveyed is that wonderful works are moldering in Hollywood vaults because their owners are too lazy to dig them out and exploit them, and that this would not be so if the works were put into the public domain.
However, refurbishing these works and making them available requires time, money, and effort, which means that someone must have an ownership interest so as to be able to invest in the project. Taking the property rights away from the original owner would not change this -- to make the refurbishing and exploitation occur, some entity must have an ownership interest or it cannot afford to take on the task. The Copyleft approach would leave the recovery of these works up to the whims of governments and foundations, and with respect to this see the earlier post quoting economist Walter Williams.
With ownership, wonderful things can happen, as described in a speech given last April by Shane Robison, CTO of HP:
"The problem today is that some of the very best stories and entertainment experiences are still sitting in old vaults wasting away, where none of us can enjoy them.
"That's why we're leveraging technologies we've developed in our labs around imaging, restoration, archiving and metadata tagging, to help bring these historical treasures back out into the light of day.
"HP has recently engaged in deals like the one that we announced with Time, Inc., to digitally restore every image every published in the history of Time magazine, and these are images like Muhammad Ali's Thrilla in Manila, or the Fall of the Wall in Berlin.
"Another partnership is with Getty Images, the world's leading provider of imagery, film and digital services. And our engagement there is to help them manage their assets for over 150 million unique visitors each month.
"Or finally with CBS to restore and make available classic entertainment experiences such as when the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show and really rocked the world for the first time.
" . . . .
"HP and Warner Brothers share a common vision for the future of digital media entertainment, a future where digital technology enhances the quality of entertainment media in both its production and in its distribution.
". . .
"This includes the ability to dynamically scale storage and compute capacity across multiple restoration projects, such as The Wizard of Oz or An American in Paris. Building on Warner Brothers' proprietary software used to restore Singing in the Rain and Robin Hood and Meet Me in St. Louis, and HP's image, color and data management technologies, HP and Warner are committed to preserving and presenting the original creative vision of these classic films in stunning digital age quality.
". . . .
"Warner Brothers told us the story of a famous director who, after seeing his film restored with this method, actually cried about halfway through the film, and to date, the consumer response to these restored films has been simply overwhelming, so together, HP and Warner Brothers intend to make this service scalable and available to the entire industry."
posted by James DeLong : 8/12/2004 01:21:56 PM
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